Plethora: love after the age of (ontological) scarcity

ALBA G. TORRENTS; ANDREU BALLÚS

California, Los Angeles

Congreso; Excess Conference; 2015

University of California, Los Angeles

The politics and metaphysics of love have traditionally been conceived under a scarcity paradigm: through the ages, romantic love has tended to be portrayed as something that has to do with finding ?the Only True One? amongst false candidates, with seizing a Fleeting Opportunity in the Right Moment. The dominance of this social imagery on love has its long term biological and economic causes in the material conditions of existence of historical societies. However, even as the basic ?objective? constraints on love and its conceptions have evolved almost to the point of disappearing (at least in some societies), the paradigm itself seems to have remained untouched, maintaining a strong continued influence in the way social relations are defined and in the kind of narratives that support the functioning of basic social institutions such as the family.We argue that this traditional conception of love as scarce and requiring a difficult selective effort has actually been strengthened as a result of the deep influence, in recent philosophical and literary discourses, of a certain group of ontologies focused in concepts such as Negativity, Lack, and (Logical and/or Empirical) Reducibility. In fact, despite its revolutionary impact in some other regards, these ontologies may have entered in a relationship of mutual reinforcement with this Myth of Scarce Love. On the other hand, there exists an alternative ontological tradition that focuses on the ideas of difference and novelty, and in the basic notion that reality is always in excess. This tradition, which includes classical authors such as Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, and one of whose most accomplished recent advocates is Gilles Deleuze, enjoys a very good health today, but its practical and political implications have not been exhaustively developed. We believe that, while not being explicitly focused on the matter of romantic love itself, this thriving line of thinking provides an ontological basis through which both the metaphysics of romantic love and its ethics and politics can be rethought in terms of freedom and excess, and ultimately freed from the sway of the scarcity mentality.